AJAX’d Wordpress is now officially a release candidate which translates to an advanced Beta. I’m hoping to officially release within a few weeks, but I will only do this after there has been ample testing on different themes and with other plugins, so I am looking for a few good, adventurous souls to help me test it in different environments.
This website has been running aWP for several week and there don’t seem to be any problems, but please ensure that you test this plugin in a developmental environment before using it on a live website. AJAX’d Wordpress is built off of INAP which was reaching maturity, so I don’t expect there to be a large number of problems, but it has changed drastically, so I expect at least a few new bugs have been created. I am also concerned about compatibility with other plugins.
Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls of all ages, and all the rest of you who dislike being labeled. I now present to you, in living color, the one and only AJAX’d Wordpress.
AJAX’d Wordpress or aWP is a complete rewrite of INAP that will allow features to be added and modified very quickly. This plugin is truly modular and unlike INAP, is completely customizable. While not available for download just yet, it has now gone live on this website. For those of you that are technically inclined, you will quickly be able to see the changes by viewing the source, Javascript and AJAX responses, but for the rest, you will be able to see the smoother functionality and the more attractive behavior.
Documentation has to be written and expanded and a few features still need to be improved, but we are looking at a RC release in a few weeks.
INAP 3.0 Progress
Aside from a brief flirtation with a couple payed projects, I’ve been heavily focusing on rewriting the code for INAP 3.0, and it has almost reached the point of a private beta (which means I start running it on this site.) I have selected the new name for INAP 3.0, but I’m not going to reveal it just yet. Here is a small preview of what you can expect from INAP 3.0:
INAP 3.0 is now truly modular with a main Javascript/PHP core that other features hook into to function. This core is easily extensible and the new structure of a main project with many smaller projects will make bugfixes and upgrades less painful, and will allow the user to upgrade the plugin section by section as most changes in the modules won’t effect the core.
For the users:
- INAP 3.0 will make upgrades far less painful.
Better Wordpress threaded comments
Here is something slightly different, I’m trying to get into the habit of writing out my notes and detailed changes in INAP 3.0 for my own use, so I thought they may help others in the process. The following walk through details the process I took to create a method to thread comments for Wordpress. Most of the project specific code has been removed to keep the code from being cluttered.
The threading structure for the plugin needed to be able to handle an unlimited number of children in an order, and the ability to “flatten” the children after a certain user-specified depth (shown in the code examples as $max_depth). The threading structure needed to be rewritten because in short, the old version (seen here) worked by individually querying the database for each comment to look for children, utilized globals to pass information from one section to another, used a complex method of if/elses to determine what functions should do, and was very slow.
As mentioned previously I have been trying to move INAP away from a simply function based system to a class based system. The PHP was unbelievably easy to convert. It literally took a couple hours to convert the entire program from prefixed functions to nice, neat and easy-to-read classes. It was rolled out with a few bugfixes and very little stress.
Then I started to do the same to Javascript, so the plugin could clarify its variables and functions and still “play nice,” and I swear the all the Javascript was specifically coded to make it difficult. Getting all the variables alone to be readable where and when they needed to be was bad by itself, throw on top of it some of the bad coding style that has just perpetuated itself over the past year in the scripts and the fact that Javascript doesn’t have real classes.
If you use INAP and have noticed oddness with your full-text feeds lately, it may have been caused by INAP. Users that had the “custom options” selected would have their feeds trimmed as if it were a post. INAP 2.4.3 fixes this.
In other news, INAP is in the process of a major overhaul including a complete rewrite of most of its antiquated structure. When this process is complete it will be rebranded to demonstrate the totality of its features (it won’t be called INAP anymore because the name is too restrictive), but will be released as version 3.0
